After the opening of the UTOPICS exhibition in August 2009, coloured spray-painted circles marked new territories on the streets and pavements of Biel’s city centre.

The circles, with a diameter of up to 200 metres, did not however indicate any future building plans – rather, they were graphic interventions.

They marked the areas in which visitors to the 11th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition could access a film Les Mèches en ligne by me and Holger Friese via public Wi-Fi. The public Wi-Fi in Biel is distributed over these different territorial zones. The zones are normally invisible; they are made up of electromagnetic waves. From the centre, an aerial, they create an invisible circle which becomes weaker with increasing distance, and at some point breaks off.

For the production of the films shown, we found hairdressing salons outside the hotspots and had our hair cut in front of a camera in these various salons at the edge of the restructured city centre. We treated the selected hairdressers as urban experts whose experience we wanted to make use of.

We also made reference to the general function of hairdressers as storytellers, possible the last representatives of an oral tradition which is dying out. For our project Les Mèches en ligne, we therefore chose to focus on salons with a larger clientele. In that we relate to the figure of the classic hairdresser as a listener and storyteller.

We were interested in the figure of the hairdresser or barber, as shown in films such as Patrice Leconte’s Le Mari de la Coiffeuse, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There.

In the conversations we wanted to find out how people in the various districts of Biel perceived the changes in the city, and how this led them to change their daily lives. The resultant film was shown immediately after a web browser was opened in one of the zones.

The film was shown as an overlay on the login page. Only people logging in when in one of the marked zones were able to watch the film. In this way the invisible Wi-Fi territories could be experienced and the protagonists of the films occupied the virtual territories with stories from the streets around the centre.

The setting for our work, the 11th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, Utopics, plays with the phonetic you, addressing the visitors and their worlds. Topic was a call for relevant issues, while utopic made reference to the idea of utopia, thus shifting the focus from a concrete place to a vision. All of this was combined with pic, a reference to the internet images, from porn to contemporary political documents, which pour onto users without end. Accordingly, our work was interested not in sculpture but in public spaces and the many levels and aspects that these spaces can have.

Art is used as a strategy to investigate society, a non-scientific tool to highlight boundaries we set ourselves in our thought and perception.

Project with Holger Friese, Bienne Schweiz 2009.

Production: Utopics

Miss Ivoire with Raymonde Grah-Meusy

Clash Hairstyle with Michael Jalon

Coiffeur Tania with Tania Santulli

Coiffeur Sporting with Pino Margarito